


Golden-Painted Memories

by Project0506



Series: Soft Wars [83]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Brothers, Family, Gen, gen - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-14
Updated: 2020-05-14
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:41:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,370
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24178327
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Project0506/pseuds/Project0506
Summary: Ponds prods his brothers into Golden Hour pictures.  Mace observes.
Series: Soft Wars [83]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1683775
Comments: 70
Kudos: 611





	Golden-Painted Memories

**Author's Note:**

> And the lovely [@thellamacorn](https://thellamacorn.tumblr.com/) over on Tumblr has given us a look at [the Golden Hour picture](https://thellamacorn.tumblr.com/post/618128799829278720/a-flimsi-copy-of-ponds-picture-that-wolffe)! Go adore them please!

There’s a hum of anticipation that hovers just over the quiet grass and loiters in between tree leaves gently curled in sleep. Dew drops well with it until their delicate tension gives way and they spill down stalks, following the veins like channels. The Living Force welcomes dawn with its own hushed exuberance, and even one with little talent to hear it can feel its content.

Mace has always been far stronger in the Unifying Force and, if he let it, it would be the only thing he could hear. But in his life filled with Shatterpoints, with learning how to look in a man’s face and know what it takes to destroy him and conversing with him anyway ( _letting him walk away_ hiss the shadows alongside which Vapaad’s path traces). Well. Sometimes struggling to find the Living Force was the only thing that held him just inside that edge of Light, before he’d built up a bedrock of control.

It’s always easier to find the Living Force at dawn and it’s always easier outside, among the millions and millions of simple organisms that hum its song.

There’s the rough grate of something from a willow genus guarding his back, some shrub behind it and curling around to Mace’s left that leaks the scent of something spicy from tightly bound pods slowly opening under the urging of a rising sun. The willow's fronds cup a bubble of shadows around it all, and the black-green of them is shot through with a cheery pale yellow of something else flowering down its branches. The small hill and the huddle of flora atop it resonate in a carefully balanced mutualism. Very often, if Mace’s mind is the right sort of quiet, his presence won’t interrupt that even though his song slides towards the deep of desires kept firmly locked away.

Today, though, Mace’s attempts to slip inside their peace is thwarted by his own nature. He’s an insect bobbing ripples on top of their still pond. He’s the one string in the orchestra tuned a tenth of a turn too tightly. It happened rarely, once. But more and more of those rare occurrences have happened recently. Mace grits his teeth, and tries to content himself with just listening to the music, without participating.

The Force gets a little harder to hear every day. It’s getting harder to touch with alarming rapidity.

He feels him before he sees him. Would, even if he hadn’t been listening so closely. He’s determination and forthrightness and drive, all wrapped tightly around a foundation of confidence. But deep inside there’s a familiar, alarming, perfectly-guarded core of molten anger that he carries with him at all times.

Commander Cody is very like Mace. Commander Cody hates him.

Just a little, the Commander is the pragmatic sort that spends his hate on situations and circumstances, usually. But he spares just a tiny sliver of intense dislike for Mace, deeply buried like a splinter under a nail. And like a splinter, it’s only buried itself deeper and harder to see over the years while ripping just as bloodily.

Mace is used to being hated. He’s the face of a religious minority and some mistake their visible presence among the Senate as any sort of meaningful influence. He’s a hard man, considered cold by many, even those who should know the kind of control he has to exert over himself. You don’t master Vapaad once; you master it every moment of every day that you keep it from pulling you under. He’s brusque, his patience for frippery rapidly waning in stark reflection of his available time.

If the Commander hated him as a man, or as a Jedi, Mace could understand that. He’s not made himself easy to like as either of those things. In those respects, he’s actually very much an easy man to dislike.

What cuts is that the Commander hates him as a representation of the slavery Mace himself opposed and opposes. It cuts that the Commander hates him more with each passing year as a symbol of the war Mace has argued against, is burning himself through trying to stop. It cuts, that the man blames him for decisions the Council makes, for situations the Order is driven into with no recourse.

It cuts that there’s nothing Mace can do, except accept it. Work with the man when the situation calls for it. Offer him the same easy professionalism he offers in return. Pretend he hasn’t felt what the Commander’s calm face hides. There’s no question that acknowledging that invasion of his privacy would be wholly counterproductive.

Mace feels most for Ponds: for the hurt his Commander hides at being the only of this smaller circle of brothers whose Jedi Commander Cody only tolerates, and only when the Army of the Republic requires it. It means that while Plo and Obi-Wan and Knight Secura and even Skywalker can offer Commander Cody their wisdom and support in his silent, ambitious endeavors to take what his brothers have always been owed, any help Mace can give must be filtered through the others if the Commander is to even consider it.

That cuts, given how strongly Mace believes in helping them. How much more he could, would do, if allowed. We will save ourselves, Ponds had said, and couldn’t meet his eyes. He won’t let you be the one to free us, he hadn’t said, as if Mace was the one to hold their bonds. As if letting Mace do anything to atone for the part he’s played would somehow cheapen their victory.

If Mace were any less of a Jedi, sometimes he thinks he could hate Commander Cody in return.

He feels Commander Cody before he sees him, and the Commander doesn’t see him at all.

Predawn breaks silver-shading-gold somewhere above Coruscant’s spires, and a thousand years of Jedi ingenuity has ensured every flicker of it is reflected here in the gardens in the heart of the temple. The byplay highlights the cut of the Commander’s shoulders, fills the hollows in his cheeks and creases around his eyes with shadows until he could be the avatar of pure exhaustion. His eyes are half-closed, and his usual stride is as close to a stumble as Mace has ever seen him allow himself to display.

He peers around, but not up, finds himself one of the half-walls enclosing a waterfall fountain and props himself up against it. Folds his arms, crosses his ankles, lets his chin drop to his chest and for all appearances goes directly back to sleep.

It’s been less than four hours since the 212th completed disembarking. It’s no surprise he’s tired. It’s a surprise that he’s here, in temple gardens. Standing, dozing, clad loose thin shirt and thick warm pants, feet crammed into his boots, upright when he’s more than earned the right to not have to be.

His hair curls out of its typical regimented style, sleep-soft like the rest of him and he’s distressingly beautiful the way all of Jango Fett’s abandoned sons are. Young, so awfully young, in the same way.

Dew clinging to the wall dampens the hem of his shirt and sticks it in rolls to his back. It must be uncomfortable. He seems too tired to care.

The snap-hiss-fire of the 501st’s Captain and the unrelenting wave of the 327th’s Commander enter the garden nearly steps behind each other, and their presences overlap and meld in the easy way Mace has been chasing for himself all night. Weariness dog their steps as well. Commander Bly throws himself against the wall and tips and slides to bodily rest against the side of Commander Cody’s knee. Captain Rex sprawls himself across and around them both: head under one’s arm, elbow around another’s ankle.

Brothers, Mace knows. All clones are brothers, but these are Ponds’ brothers in a way that doesn’t translate to Basic and he wasn’t able to explain in the limited Mando’a Mace has picked up. Mace thinks he might have a better understanding, now.

Before this moment, Mace would have considered Commander Bly reserved, and Captain Rex reticent. Commander Bly is never closer than a step and a half to anyone, never any less than full armor. He might take his helmet off, if he’s particularly relaxed, Mace had once thought. It had only been a day of working with him directly, once when Ponds decided to take a vacation day before Mace had argued the army into allowing such for clones, but Mace hadn’t seen any hint to contradict that impression.

He’d moved away, every time it seems as though someone might slip inside his unmarked perimeter. Mace had thought he’d had his measure.

Captain Rex was a dichotomy. His presence in the Force was nothing like the image he portrayed. Mace has never seen that edge of playfulness in action. What he knew of Captain Rex professionally was his impossible ability to curb the worse of Skywalker’s excesses, to direct his energy and derail the hastiest of his impulses. Mace had seen those quickfire plans he’s capable of filtered through Skywalker’s orders and had taken Captain Rex for a quintessential ideal Second in Command.

Ponds’ brother Bly is snide and funny. Ponds’ brother Rex is demanding and irrepressible. Ponds’ brother Cody loves them both, and rouses himself only to nudge one or tip the other or murmur what Mace can’t hear but can feel are loving insults. Captain Rex switches sides between his brothers as easy as breathing. He’ll back up Commander Cody in one breath and support Commander Bly against him in the next, and he’ll worm his way into the lap of, or under the arm of, or around the ankles of whoever he’s bestowing his support upon in this moment. Like a little brother.

Mace would have expected Ponds’ bubbly every-day-joy, what he calls _ shereshoy _1 would crash in discord up against Commander Wolffe’s brash, unfiltered bent towards pessimism, but the final pair entering the gardens feel more like pieces of a whole than opposing forces. Ponds wraps bodily around Commander Wolffe’s arm and though he grunts insults to Ponds’ intelligence and the chemical composition of his incubation tube, Commander Wolffe grips right back.

He also has a sense of humor. Mace wouldn’t have guessed.

Ponds throws himself and his armful into the pile of his brothers and they bicker and hiss and scratch and bite like a tangle of tooka. They grab into headlocks and smash foreheads, they armlock and half-nelson and more than once pairs of them go out of their way to knock Captain Rex off his feet. They insult faces and hair and insist on assigning relative attractiveness and insist that the others are far down the scale.

Their hair and arms and clothes are damp with dew and the grass where they play stirs up sweet smelling comfort in the brightening air. Someone rolls to clunk against a wall, another stops and points and laughs. A third trips the laugher into the victim and another scuffle kicks up pollen before any of the others have even trailed off.

It’s Ponds that pulls them to a stop, that lifts Commander Wolffe off Commander Bly and prods them into some semblance of a row on either side of Commander Cody. He tries to wrestle Captain Rex under his chin, but the blond is slicker than Ponds is clingy and escapes to shove himself between Commanders Wolffe and Cody. He makes a face, as if he wants to stick his tongue out at Ponds. Ponds pouts, as if he wants to grin. He puts a portable holorecorder up on top of the half-wall lightning to white in the morning, fiddles with it, the little red dot of recording blinks on.

Golden Hour pictures, Mace realizes with something that feels more than a little melancholy. Ponds had been so fascinated with the idea, when Mace had invited him into one of the council’s.

All clones are brothers, but this is Ponds’ family, caught in a single moment all in the same place and living every second and inch of it before war rips them to opposite ends of the galaxy again.

The 501st ships out this evening. The 212th just landed. The 327th are stood down for a week, but that doesn’t mean anything at all if an emergency develops. The 104th is on council reserve, to be deployed sometime within the next 40 hours to escort Mace himself and Lightning Squadron to negotiations. This is the only sunrise they’ll have together until Force knows when. This might be the first sunrise they’ve all had together during this war.

They only hold position for nearly a full minute, before one does something and Captain Rex screeches, high and offended and they roll back into a scrap. The recorder blinks on and captures them as they truly are: laughing and insulting and trying and failing to pin one another to the floor, victims of swiftly changing loyalties within their little group.

Young men, Mace mourns, stealing a chance to be who they could always have been.

Golden Hour brightens to day, and Ponds manages to claw himself from the center of a pile to check the images they got.

His joy explodes bright in the morning, sparks like static through the Living Force darting between the last of the disappearing dew. One by one, Ponds brothers are persuaded to contain their roughhousing to no more than small shoves and teasing as they flick through the records they’ve taken of their family. They warm the air in the Force with their content.

Commander Cody’s satisfaction doesn’t quite touch that core of rage he keeps tight and banked, but it comes close. And it lingers in him, even as the world begins crowding in on them, as they tuck themselves back into their personas and leave with more decorum than they’d arrived with.

This will be a good morning for meditation, for the Jedi wandering in to find such. Ponds’ family’s happiness has soaked into the ground and air.

Mace leaves, before the tones of his bittersweet pensiveness twangs against the harmony they’ve sung.

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. Lust for life . The enjoyment of each day and the determination to seek and grab every possible experience, as well as surviving to see the next day - hanging onto life and relishing it. Closely related to and shares a root with the words for live, hunt and stay safe and 'oya' ('Let's Hunt'). Back  
> 


End file.
